Not for the faint of heart: De humani corporis fabrica

Today, Halloween, is traditionally marked with bats, pumpkins, ghosts and of course, skeletons. In the 1500’s, one man changed the way the medical world saw the skeletal and muscular systems of the human body. That man, Andreas Vesalius, illustrated anatomical features in his De humani corporis fabrica (On the structure of the human body) in a way never before seen. Although the pages below may seem gruesome (fair warning, gentle readers!), they come from one of the most influential anatomy books of all time.

Portrait of Andreas Vesalius

Born in Brussels in 1514, Andreas Vesalius came from a family of doctors and apothecaries. When he became a physician himself and began teaching medical school in the 1530’s, most of the standard texts were based on animal dissections and the observations of an ancient Roman doctor named Galen. Vesalius took the unconventional step of performing dissections live in front of his medical students and using human bodies (like those of deceased criminals!).

In 1543, he published De humani corporis fabrica, with wood-cut illustrations of human dissections. But the bodies weren’t just laying still, as if on a mortuary slab. They were posed, with various layers of tissue artfully falling away. The book is considered one of the first anatomical works, showing and describing various systems in the body.